Career development events develop career and life skills in youth, but limited work has been done to assess the motivation of students who participate in these events. The purpose of this study was to validate an instrument developed to measure youth motivation to participate in career development events. An instrument grounded in expectancy-value motivation was developed to assess student motivation of youth participants (N = 2,153) at 12 career development events in various domains at the state level. Four factors--self-efficacy, cost & utility value, intrinsic value, and attainment--explained 60% of the variance in youth motivation to participate in state career development events. Youth were most motivated to participate in career development events based on the cost & utility factor, therefore, they were willing to put forth the time and effort to participate in career development events because they felt career development events would help them achieve their goals. However, youth coaches should consider using strategies to develop youth self-efficacy to perform the tasks in career development events as it explained 39% of the variance in youth motivation. Coaches should also consider the role interest motivation plays a role as it was highly correlated with self-efficacy.